Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. In her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, Maya Wind draws on extensive research in English and Hebrew to shatter this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.The book shows that Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel’s system of oppression against Palestinians, with whole disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all bolstering Israeli occupation and apartheid, while simultaneously stifling critical scholarship, violently repressing student dissent, and violating the rights of Palestinians to education.In this launch event, Maya Wind will be joined by Nadia Abu El-Haj and Naomi Klein to discuss Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project, and what we can do to oppose it.

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Order a copy of Towers of Ivory and Steel: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3009-towers-of-ivory-and-steel

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Speakers:

Maya Wind is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship broadly investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. She has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. Prof. Abu El-Haj is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology; and Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and the international bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, On Fire, and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which was published in September 2023. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she is a columnist for The Guardian. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UBC and the Director of Community Engagement for the Centre for Climate Justice.

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